In order to ensure second-order multi-agent systems (MAS) realizing consensus more quickly in a limited time, a new protocol is proposed. In this new protocol, the gradient algorithm of the overall cost function is introduced in the original protocol to enhance the connection between adjacent agents and improve the moving speed of each agent in the MAS. Utilizing Lyapunov stability theory, graph theory and homogeneity theory, sufficient conditions and detailed proof for achieving a finite-time consensus of the MAS are given. Finally, MAS with three following agents and one leading agent is simulated. Moreover, the simulation results indicated that this new protocol could make the system more stable, more robust and convergence faster when compared with other protocols.

Nowadays, the number of pets in the Republic of Korea (ROK) is continuously growing, and people’s
perception of animals is changing. Accordingly, new systems and services for them are emerging. Despite
such changes, there are still many serious problems such as animal cruelty, abandonment, and factory-type
breeding places. In this study, we have conducted a research on the design of a humane animal care system
and its implementation with Java. The methodology involved in the design will enable managing animals'
safety and health by systematically categorizing and studying each health-related issue for protection.
Moreover, with this methodology, animals can avert risks through periodic examinations, and the analyzed
data will be useful in managing animals efficiently. Thus, this paper proposes a system that monitors whether
the owners actually carry out such obligation. Authors expect this convenient, easily accessible system to lead
to a more humane approach to the animals they own. The authors plan to establish an animal care network
together with local animal associations for the active promotion of the system implemented in this study, in
the hope that the network will be extended nationwide.

In this work, we are interested in the extraction of areas of interest from satellite images by introducing a MOTRIBES/OC-SVM approach. The One-Class Support Vector Machine (OC-SVM) is based on the estimation of a support that includes training data. It identifies areas of interest without including other classes from the scene. We propose generating optimal training data using the Multi-Objective TRIBES (MO-TRIBES) to improve the performances of the OC-SVM. The MO-TRIBES is a parameter-free optimization technique that manages the search space in tribes composed of agents. It makes different behavioral and structural adaptations to minimize the false positive and false negative rates of the OC-SVM. We have applied our proposed approach for the extraction of earthquakes and urban areas. The experimental results and comparisons with different state-of-the-art classifiers confirm the efficiency and the robustness of the proposed approach.

Mobility arises naturally in the Internet of Things networks, since the location of mobile objects, e.g., mobile agents, mobile software, mobile things, or users with wireless hardware, changes as they move. Tracking their current location is essential to mobile computing. To overcome the scalability problem, hierarchical architectures of location databases have been proposed. When location updates and lookups for mobile objects are localized, these architectures become effective. However, the network signaling costs and the execution number of database operations increase particularly when the scale of the architectures and the numbers of databases becomes large to accommodate a great number of objects. This disadvantage can be alleviated by a location caching scheme which exploits the spatial and temporal locality in location lookup. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical location caching scheme, which acclimates the existing location caching scheme to a hierarchical architecture of location databases. The performance analysis indicates that the adjustment of such thresholds has an impact on cost reduction in the proposed scheme.

System Architecture Evolution (SAE) with Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been used as the key technology for the next generation mobile networks. To support mobility in the LTE/SAE-based mobile networks, the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP), in which the Mobile Access Gateway (MAG) of the PMIP is deployed at the Serving Gateway (S-GW) of LTE/SAE and the Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) of PMIP is employed at the PDN Gateway (P-GW) of LTE/SAE, is being considered. In the meantime, the Host Identity Protocol (HIP) and the Locator Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) have recently been proposed with the identifier-locator separation principle, and they can be used for mobility management over the global-scale networks. In this paper, we discuss how to provide the inter-domain mobility management over PMIP-based LTE/SAE networks by investigating three possible scenarios: mobile IP with PMIP (denoted by MIP-PMIP-LTE/SAE), HIP with PMIP (denoted by HIP-PMIP-LTE/SAE), and LISP with PMIP (denoted by LISP-PMIP-LTE/SAE). For performance analysis of the candidate inter-domain mobility management schemes, we analyzed the traffic overhead at a central agent and the total transmission delay required for control and data packet delivery. From the numerical results, we can see that HIP-PMIP-LTE/SAE and LISP-PMIP-LTE/SAE are preferred to MIP-PMIP-LTE/SAE in terms of traffic overhead; whereas, LISP-PMIP-LTE/SAE is preferred to HIP-PMIP-LTE/SAE and MIP-PMIP-LTE/SAE in the viewpoint of total transmission delay.

Our approach permits to capitalize the expert’s knowledge as business rules by using an agent-based platform. The objective of our approach is to allow experts to manage the daily evolutions of business domains without having to use a technician, and to allow them to be implied, and to participate in the development of the application to accomplish the daily tasks of their work. Therefore, the manipulation of an expert’s knowledge generates the need for information security and other associated technologies. The notion of cryptography has emerged as a basic concept in business rules modeling. The purpose of this paper is to present a cryptographic algorithm based approach to integrate the security aspect in business rules modeling. We propose integrating an agent-based approach in the framework. This solution utilizes a security agent with domain ontology. This agent applies an encryption/decryption algorithm to allow for the confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity of the most important rules. To increase the security of these rules, we used hybrid cryptography in order to take advantage of symmetric and asymmetric algorithms. We performed some experiments to find the best encryption algorithm, which provides improvement in terms of response time, space memory, and security

The use of mobile agents for collaborative processing in wireless sensor network has gained considerable attention. This is when mobile agents are used for data aggregation to exploit redundant and correlated data. The efficiency of agent-based data aggregation depends on the agent migration scheme. However, in general, most of the proposed schemes are centralized approach-based schemes where the sink node determines the migration paths for the agents before dispatching them in the sensor network. The main limitations with such schemes are that they need global network topology information for deriving the migration paths of the agents, which incurs additional communication overhead, since each node has a very limited communication range. In addition, a centralized approach does not provide fault tolerant and adaptive migration paths. In order to solve such problems, we have proposed a distributed approach-based scheme for determining the migration path of the agents where at each hop, the local information is used to decide the migration of the agents. In addition, we also propose a local repair mechanism for dealing with the faulty nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better than existing schemes in the presence of faulty nodes within the networks, and manages to report the aggregated data to the sink faster.

The localization of multi-agents, such as people, animals, or robots, is a requirement to accomplish several tasks. Especially in the case of multi-robotic applications, localization is the process for determining the positions of robots and targets in an unknown environment. Many sensors like GPS, lasers, and cameras are utilized in the localization process. However, these sensors produce a large amount of computational resources to process complex algorithms, because the process requires environmental mapping. Currently, combination multi-robots or swarm robots and sensor networks, as mobile sensor nodes have been widely available in indoor and outdoor environments. They allow for a type of efficient global localization that demands a relatively low amount of computational resources and for the independence of specific environmental features. However, the inherent instability in the wireless signal does not allow for it to be directly used for very accurate position estimations and making difficulty associated with conducting the localization processes of swarm robotics system. Furthermore, these swarm systems are usually highly decentralized, which makes it hard to synthesize and access global maps, it can be decrease its flexibility. In this paper, a simple pyramid RAM-based Neural Network architecture is proposed to improve the localization process of mobile sensor nodes in indoor environments. Our approach uses the capabilities of learning and generalization to reduce the effect of incorrect information and increases the accuracy of the agent’s position. The results show that by using simple pyramid RAM-base Neural Network approach, produces low computational resources, a fast response for processing every changing in environmental situation and mobile sensor nodes have the ability to finish several tasks especially in localization processes in real time.

In Jøsang’s subjective logic, the fusion operator is not able to fuse three or more opinions at a time and it cannot consider the effect of time factors on fusion. Also, the base rate (a) and non-informative prior weight (C) could not change dynamically. In this paper, we propose an Improved Subjective Logic Model with Evidence Driven (ISLM-ED) that expands and enriches the subjective logic theory. It includes the multi-agent unified fusion operator and the dynamic function for the base rate (a) and the non-informative prior weight (C) through the changes in evidence. The multi-agent unified fusion operator not only meets the commutative and associative law but is also consistent with the researchers’s cognitive rules. A strict mathematical proof was given by this paper. Finally, through the simulation experiments, the results show that the ISLM-ED is more reasonable and effective and that it can be better adapted to the changing environment.

The decision-making by agents in games is commonly based on reinforcement learning. To improve the quality of agents, it is necessary to solve the problems of the time and state space that are required for learning. Such problems can be solved by Macro-Actions, which are defined and executed by a sequence of primitive actions. In this line of research, the learning time is reduced by cutting down the number of policy decisions by agents. Macro-Actions were originally defined as combinations of the same primitive actions. Based on studies that showed the generation of Macro-Actions by learning, Macro-Actions are now thought to consist of diverse kinds of primitive actions. However an enormous amount of learning time and state space are required to generate Macro-Actions. To resolve these issues, we can apply insights from studies on the learning of tasks through Programming by Demonstration (PbD) to generate Macro- Actions that reduce the learning time and state space. In this paper, we propose a method to define and execute Macro-Actions. Macro-Actions are learned from a human subject via PbD and a policy is learned by reinforcement learning. In an experiment, the proposed method was applied to a car simulation to verify the scalability of the proposed method. Data was collected from the driving control of a human subject, and then the Macro- Actions that are required for running a car were generated. Furthermore, the policy that is necessary for driving on a track was learned. The acquisition of Macro-Actions by PbD reduced the driving time by about 16% compared to the case in which Macro-Actions were directly defined by a human subject. In addition, the learning time was also reduced by a faster convergence of the optimum policies.

For disaster exploration and surveillance application, this paper aims to present a novel application of a multi-robot agent based on WSN and to evaluate a multihop communication caused by the robotics correspondingly, which are used in the uncertain and unknown subterranean tunnel. A Primary-Scout Multi-Robot System (PSMRS) was proposed. A chain topology in a subterranean environment was implemented using a trimmed ZigBee2006 protocol stack to build the multi-hop communication network. The ZigBee IC-CC2530 modular circuit was adapted by mounting it on the PS-MRS. A physical experiment based on the strategy of PS-MRS was used in this paper to evaluate the efficiency of multi-hop communication and to realize the delivery of data packets in an unknown and uncertain underground laboratory environment

This paper proposes a personal information protection model that allows a user to regulate his or her own personal information and privacy protection policies to receive services provided by a service provider without having to reveal personal information in a way that the user is opposed to. When the user needs to receive a service that requires personal information, the user will only reveal personal information that they find acceptable and for uses that they agree with. Users receive desired services from the service provider only when there is agreement between the user’s and the service provider’s security policies. Moreover, the proposed model utilizes a mobile agent that is transmitted from the user’s personal space, providing the user with complete control over their privacy protection. In addition, the mobile agent is itself a selfdestructing program that eliminates the possibility of personal information being leaked. The mobile agent described in this paper allows users to truly control access to their personal information.

Most of the data warehouse (DW) requirements engineering approaches have not distinguished the early requirements engineering phase from the late requirements engineering phase. There are very few approaches seen in the literature that explicitly model the early & late requirements for a DW. In this paper, we propose an AGDI (Agent-Goal-Decision-Information) model to support the early and late requirements for the development of DWs. Here, the notion of agent refers to the stakeholders of the organization and the dependency among agents refers to the dependencies among stakeholders for fulfilling their organizational goals. The proposed AGDI model also supports three interrelated modeling activities namely, organization modeling, decision modeling and information modeling. Here, early requirements are modeled by performing organization modeling and decision modeling activities, whereas late requirements are modeled by performing information modeling activities. The proposed approach has been illustrated to capture the early and late requirements for the development of a university data warehouse exemplifying our model’s ability of supporting its decisional goals by providing decisional information.

The Internet explosion and the increase in crucial web applications such as ebanking and e-commerce, make essential the need for network security tools. One of such tools is an Intrusion detection system which can be classified based on detection approachs as being signature-based or anomaly-based. Even though intrusion detection systems are well defined, their cooperation with each other to detect attacks needs to be addressed. Consequently, a new architecture that allows them to cooperate in detecting attacks is proposed. The architecture uses Software Agents to provide scalability and distributability. It works in two modes: learning and detection. During learning mode, it generates a profile for each individual system using a fuzzy data mining algorithm. During detection mode, each system uses the FuzzyJess to match network traffic against its profile. The architecture was tested against a standard data set produced by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the primary results show its efficiency and capability to detect attacks. Finally, two new methods, the memory-window and memoryless-window, were developed for extracting useful parameters from raw packets. The parameters are used as detection metrics

The use of agent paradigm in today¡¯s applications is hampered by the security concerns of agents and hosts alike. The agents require the presence of a secure and trusted execution environment; while hosts aim at preventing the execution of potentially malicious code. In general, hosts support the migration of agents through the provision of an agent server and managing the activities of arriving agents on the host. Numerous studies have been conducted to address the security concerns present in the mobile agent paradigm with a strong focus on the theoretical aspect of the problem. Various proposals in Intrusion Detection Systems aim at securing hosts in traditional client-server execution environments. The use of such proposals to address the security of agent hosts is not desirable since migrating agents typically execute on hosts as a separate thread of the agent server process. Agent servers are open to the execution of virtually any migrating agent; thus the intent or tasks of such agents cannot be known a priori. It is also conceivable that migrating agents may wish to hide their intentions from agent servers. In light of these observations, this work attempts to bridge the gap from theory to practice by analyzing the security mechanisms available in Aglet. We lay the foundation for implementation of application specific protocols dotted with access control, secured communication and ability to detect tampering of agent data. As agents exists in a distributed environment, our proposal also introduces a novel security framework to address the security concerns of hosts through collaboration and pattern matching even in the presence of differing views of the system. The introduced framework has been implemented on the Aglet platform and evaluated in terms of accuracy, false positive, and false negative rates along with its performance strain on the system.

Web services are the new building block of today¡¯s Internet, and provides interoperability among heterogeneous distributed systems. Recently in web services environment, security has become one of the most critical issues. The hackers attack one of fragile point and can misuse legitimate user privilege because all of the connected devices provide services for the user control and monitoring in real time. Also, the users of web services must temporarily delegate some or all of their rights to agents in order to perform actions on their behalf. This fact risks the exposure of user privacy information. In this paper, we propose secure delegation model based on SAML that provides confidentiality and integrity about the user information in distributed systems. In order to support privacy protection, service confidentiality, and assertion integrity, encryption and a digital signature mechanism is deployed. We build web service management server based on XACML, in order to manage services and policies of web service providers.

A RMON agent system, which locates on a subnet, collects the network traffic information for management by retrieving and analyzing all of the packets on the subnet. The RMON agent system can miss some packets due to the high packet analyzing overhead when the number of packets on the subnet is huge. In this paper, we have developed a light-weight RMON agent system that can handle a large amount of packets without packet loss. Our RMON agent system has also been designed such that its functionality can be added dynamically when needed. To demonstrate the dynamic reconfiguration capability of our RMON agent system, a simple port scanning attack detection module is added to the RMON agent system. We have also evaluated the performance of our RMON agent system on a large network that has a huge traffic. The test result has shown our RMON agent system can analyze the network packets without packet loss.

When a pedagogical agent system aims to provide students with interactive help, it needs to know what knowledge the student has and what goals the student is currently trying to achieve. That is, it must do both assessment and plan recognition. These modeling tasks involve a high level of uncertainty when students are allowed to follow various lines of reasoning and are not required to show all their reasoning explicitly. In this paper, the student model for interactive edutainment applications is proposed. This model is based on Bayesian Networks to expose constructs and parameters of rules and propositions pertaining to game and problem solving activities. This student model could be utilized as the emotion generation model for student and agent as well.

Indexing

JIPS is also selected as the Journal for Accreditation by NRF (National Research Foundation of Korea).

This journal was supported by the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies Grant funded by the Korean Government (Ministry of Education).

Society

ABOUT THE SOCIETY

Ever since information processing became one of the most important industries in the country, computing professionals have encountered a growing number of challenges.
Along with scholars and colleagues in related fields, they have gathered together at a variety of forums and meetings over the last few decades to share their knowledge and experiences,
and the outcomes of their research. These exchanges led to the founding of the Korea Information Processing Society (KIPS) on January 15, 1993. The KIPS was registered as an incorporated association under the Ministry of Science,
ICT and Future Planning under the government of the Republic of Korea. The main purpose of the KIPS organization is to improve our society by achieving the highest capability possible in the domain of information technology.
As such, it focuses on close collaboration with the nationâs industry, academic, and research communities to foster technological innovation,
to enhance its members' careers, and to promote the advanced information processing industry.